This is a story that I hope will have a happy ending. It’s not so happy at this time. And it has somewhat shaken my confidence and trust in buying things on the Internet, as I’ve had fortunately very few bad experiences until now.

And it comes from a company that I’d least expect it from — Lufthansa. Their service to me has been so far pretty good both on and off the ground and so I was confident to set off buying tickets from them on the Internet. Unfortunately, things went otherwise. And this also serves as a reminder to myself to record all the facts here.

On March 6 (Tuesday), I bought some tickets on lufthansa.com for a flight that was supposed to be on March 17. The only delivery option they offered was paper ticket delivery to an address, and so I had them deliver the tickets to my address in Luxembourg. (I have used that address for Internet deliveries, and companies like Fedex have been able to deliver fine to it.) I also got a confirmed booking reference so I knew that wherever the tickets are, I am at least booked on the flight.

When tickets hadn’t showed up by March 13 (the next Tue), I got a bit nervous.

On March 14 (Wed), I called Lufthansa reservations phone support and asked them what’s going on. They said I need to wait, and if they didn’t show up, call them back on the night before the flight, so that they could re-route the tickets for airport pickup.

The tickets didn’t show up. So on March 16 (Fri) afternoon, I called the reservations again and explained them the whole thing. They said fine, they’ll send the tickets to the airport.

On Saturday morning the 17th, I show up at the airport a few hours before the flight. The agent says he sees my reservation, but the tickets haven’t been “prepared”. And the only option I have to get on the flight is to re-pay for the tickets, and then claim the double payment back from Lufthansa. ?????? He wasn’t too nice to me, saying “I know it’s not your fault, but it’s not mine either.”

Well fuck that. I really needed to get on the flight, so I figured the right thing to do would be just to comply at the time, swallowing the extra cost and buying my damn tickets. Good for me that I happen to be a person who can just afford an extra 1000€ out of the blue. What if I was someone in a less fortunate financial situation? Like what if my credit card limit was smaller or busted? The fact then would have been that I had been paid for my tickets, but not able to receive them and not being able to take my flights. And then things would have got really ugly.

But now, at least I got my damn flights. And now, Lufthansa owes me 1000€ and I’ll need to start claiming it back from them. I’m not sure if I’d even bother if the amount was smaller, but 1000€ is too big to just let it go out of sight because of a stupid double payment. So I’m anxious to see how this ends up. I’m hoping to just get my money back, I guess it’s too much to expect an apology or any other form of compensation, even though they screwed up and wasted a lot of my time and nerves. They can say that in the end, I still got on my flights so all is in order. Bah.

And next time, I’ll think twice before I buy plane tickets from the Internet. Or from Lufthansa.

UPDATE: the tickets were in my Luxembourg mailbox Mar 20. That is TWO WEEKS after I purchased them and halfway into my trip. This is not really funny at all.